Can You Grow Tomatoes on a Peach Tree

Fruit trees are nice, but they take up a lot of space. What happens if we try to grow a tomato on a fruit tree to get a double yield? I have been growing this garden for almost 15 years now, and throughout that time, my fruit trees have grown huge, which has reduced the amount of space for some of my annuals like tomatoes. Grabbing a fresh, homegrown, organic harvest from a peach tree is truly something special. But as they grow, they take up a lot of space. And also, by the time like mid-summer comes, it seems like most of the peaches are finished, and I was thinking, is there a clever way to get more from my peach trees? I came up with this idea when I was out pruning my peach trees in the winter one year. Peaches grow best when you prune them to what's known as an open center. What we do is we encourage those branches to grow out and away from the tree, and then we also remove a lot of the growth in the center of the tree. What this does is it gets more light and airflow to come in, and that helps fight diseases like fungal issues, which are always problems when it comes to peach trees. Because so much of the growth is removed close to the center of the tree, it opens up a lot of windows of light. So I figured there should be enough light for me to grow tomatoes under the tree and then up the tree, so that's what I tried to do. In spring, I planted some tomato seeds in trees. I decided to plant the super sweet 100 tomato because it's probably my all-time favorite variety. After the seeds sprouted, I transplanted them into a larger pot and let them continue growing. I wanted my tomato plant to grow underneath the peach tree, but I didn't want to plant it directly in the ground under the tree because I didn't want the tomato plant and the peach tree like competing with one another for water and also for some nutrition. So what I did was decided to plant my tomato plant in a container. I grabbed a food-safe 5-gallon bucket from Lowe's and drilled some holes in the bottom for drainage. Then I took some of my homemade soil, filled my bucket, grabbed my JP Secret Stuff Fertilizer, and added it to the soil and mixed it in the top few inches. Next, I grabbed my tomato, popped it out of the container, and transplanted it into its new home. Lastly, I watered it in. The plant continued to grow well and I just stayed on top of watering it until it was large enough to start tying it to the tree. Let's jump into some live shots of me doing that. I've got a real cool idea I want to share with you guys. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take a tomato in a pot. I'm going to put the pot right down here. I'm going to tie a string up to the peach tree. This way I can have tomatoes growing up the string and tomatoes literally growing on the peach tree. Let me bring you over to the tomato. I've got some tomatoes I've been growing over here. This one is getting massive, getting too tall, and the bamboo stake isn't working great in the bucket. So we're going to switch things up. I like putting this tray underneath the tomato plants just so it can help soak up the water. So I'm going to take this tray, place it there, get my tomato plant right here. Just going to take tomato twine. This is a strong string and it fits perfect into tomato clips. So we're going to take this, tie it to the tree. I'm not worried about it cutting into the tree or anything because it's not going to carry a lot of weight. Next, I'm going to tie it down to this bucket here. Just taking these clips and clipping the plant. This way it starts growing up the string. I'll clip a couple more here now too. Next, I'm going to take this stake out that I have. So I just want to be careful as I do that. I'm going to cut the old clips off. I'm going to remove this. I don't need it anymore. And now I'm going to start tying my tomato to this main string here. I'm going to take this string here, tie it, clip it to the main branch on the plant. There we go. I'm just going to keep continuing to clip it. So I got the tomato all tied up. Now I'm just going to remove some of these lower suckers even though they're pretty big. So like this. I don't want this continuing to grow out. I'm just going to take it off. What I really want is just like three tops basically like we have up here. Three main stems. One would be better but three is fine going up all the way to the top. So we're going to remove some of these lower ones and some of these lower leaves. Anything that could harbor disease. By cutting all this stuff off we're going to redirect the growth into the tops that we leave. There we go. Cleaned up a bunch. One more to take off over here. And that looks a lot better. More balanced. A lot healthier. Should be good to go to produce a lot of amazing fruit. And it's going to be crazy to see the tomato growing up the string but then we're going to be tying the tomato to the peach tree. It's going to be like peach trees are yielding tomatoes. It's going to be, it's going to be awesome. I also decided to grow a sun gold cherry up the same peach tree just on a different branch. So I ran a string and tied this one up as well. A few days later I went out to give the tomato plant some additional nutrition. I took some of my homemade soil and mixed in some of my fertilizer. Then I took that soil and used it as a top dressing for my tomato plant to make sure it has enough nutrition to produce a lot of fruit. Right here is the plant after the top dressing. It's looking happy and healthy. A couple of days after that I went by and added some diced leaf mulch to the container to help the soil retain moisture and also stay cooler. 10 days later the first tomatoes formed and I was super excited. And 19 days after that the first tomatoes were ready to harvest. Just like in a natural forest you'll have a lot of the vines climbing up trees. So what we did is we put tomatoes in pots underneath the trees and we're vining those up a tree. So just like how a forest does it. The climbers are going right up a fruit tree and you'll notice there's peaches right to the right of us here. So we're still getting that double production. We didn't plant the tomatoes directly in the ground under this tree. Instead we just put them in pots. This helps us to get a lot of out of this space too. Here's a sun gold cherry we are growing in a pot up a single stem attached to a string up a peach tree. Notice how we're attaching these plants to the string. We're using these tomato clips. These work so well. Indeterminate tomatoes like this one here the sun gold cherry or even like this super sweet 100 over here. These tomatoes will continue to produce up until the frost. So you may need to add another round of additional fertilizer. What you should do is just monitor the plants. Watch what's going on and if you see some of the leaves starting to turn a paler green add a little fertilizer. If you're new to gardening and you have the space I suggest growing the super sweet 100 tomato. It's easy to grow. It's extremely disease resistant. It pumps out an insane amount of tomatoes and it will continue to produce well for you up until the frost. By mid-August the plant was growing beautifully up the peach tree and was kicking out a bunch of fruit. And to my surprise the plant continued growing well and producing. I was still getting harvests from this plant in mid-October which is insane around here in New Jersey zone 7a. That's today's video growers. Thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you got something out of it. Overall this was just such a fun video to make and like I mentioned I just came up with the idea when I was out pruning the fruit trees one day pruning those peaches because when you do prune the peaches it just opens up so much space and I was thinking there's plenty of light here to grow something. I was also thinking I'm running out of space because my fruit trees are getting so dang big so anywhere I could fit a space in I'm gonna try to grow something. And that's what I want to share with you guys too is to keep it open mind and look for different spaces and options where people might not not even thought of. If the light hits the ground somewhere there's no reason you can't grow stuff in a pot and put it right in that location. That's what I did and I got some extra yields and it just worked out fantastic and I'm really happy that I did it. If you'll notice a lot of this footage well most of this footage was from years ago because I actually did this three years ago back in 2022. I just never posted it because I didn't think it was the right time. Now I just thought it was an interesting idea. It was fun to do and it just got me thinking because I'm gonna be planting fruit trees at my new property. So I was like what are some of the things that I've done in the past which would be fun to do again and growing tomatoes and growing crops under the fruit trees to get that extra yield just happened to be so awesome and the fact that I could do it in the container just I think made it a lot better because I didn't have to disrupt the fruit tree and they didn't compete and it just worked great overall. I had a blast making this video and I wanted to send a thank you to one of our new channel members Ronnie Curry. Thanks for being a part of Team Grow. Thanks for having your hand in everything we're doing out here. I also want to mention to check out some of the merch at teamgrow.us. We've got a bunch of new designs. I'm super proud of them and they all have a meaning and the story behind them. Another thing is you guys got to go over to the community to check out what we have going on and growing on in there. There's so many people on there posting all the time every day an incredible level of engagement. It's great to see I'm always on there answering people. So if you want to get connected and be part of the team that's the place to go the community over at teamgrow.us. Overall the days are getting shorter, the weather is getting cooler, some of the leaves are even starting to drop, fall is on the way and that we're not going to slow down though. We're going to keep sowing, we're going to keep growing so we can keep the harvests coming. If you guys enjoyed the video hit the like button, hit the subscribe button, share it with your friends and just get engaged down in the comments. Let us know what you thought about this idea. It's a little different but overall come on getting two fruit harvests from one tree you can't beat that. We'll be back to you with another one real soon. We out!